Diabetes is a chronic, incurable disease that causes an array of serious medical complications and even premature death. Complications include heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, and nervous system disorders. Although diabetes is a potentially devastating disease, early diagnosis and tight glycemic control can greatly diminish the medical complications and cost of this disease.
The goal of tight control is to maintain one's blood glucose levels within a physiologically acceptable range. Tight control therefore typically requires frequent blood glucose measurements, which provides the information needed to administer insulin or glucose properly. The pain, cost and inconvenience of state-of-the-art glucose monitoring technology impede frequent monitoring and are primarily responsible for the failure of patients to maintain tight control. Thus, it has been recognized for several decades that an ideal treatment of diabetes would involve a closed-loop insulin delivery system that is implanted within the patient's body.
This so-called artificial pancreas could comprise an insulin delivery pump coupled with some type of glucose-sensing technology. Using this system, insulin could be delivered continuously in response to detected changes in the blood glucose concentrations. However, for this system to be operable, the glucose sensing component must be able to provide accurate and rapid blood glucose values to a micro-processing unit, which would compute the amount of insulin required and then control the required insulin delivery. Accordingly, the successful development of an artificial pancreas or other artificial biological delivery system as described above depends on the development of implantable analyte (i.e., glucose) sensing technology and corresponding electronic support that can reliably control the instrumentation. Thus, there is a need in the art for implantable analyte sensing technology and electronic support that can enable the continuous operation of an analyte detection system for extended durations with minimal or even no user intervention required.